Online Backup: What’s really getting backed up?

Posted on: August 26th, 2010

Online backup is a great invention. It can save you a lot of grief in case of a hard drive crash, stolen laptop, etc. However there are some drawbacks and limitation that I think it’s important to know about so that you don’t get a bad surprise.

Speed

First thing to know about online backups is that they can take a long time. The reason is that they use your internet connection to make the data transfer, more specifically the upload speed (which is the speed that is from your machine to an outside server) – which is usually only about 1/4th or 1/5th of the whole bandwidth. So a few gigabytes of data can take days to back up. Restoring files is faster because the download speed is higher than the upload speed. But it can still take a long time to restore your files when they are large, or numerous.

What Gets or Doesn’t Get Backed Up

Another thing that it’s usually not mentioned that not all file types get backed up normally by online backup software. Most notably your video clips and movies. These are generally excluded from the backup unless you specifically tell the software to include these as well. This is basically just an effort on the part of the backup service providers to save storage space. I was happy to see that the new version of Carbonite software is now offering the option right at the setup steps to include these, or not.

So it’d be wise, that once the initial backup of your data is complete, to do a check-up on what’s has actually gotten backed up. In case of most online software you can go to “My Computer” or “Computer” and will see a backup drive which you can open up and see the files that are backed up. If you can’t figure it out then you can always contact the tech support of the backup service provider, they should also help you to make sure all of your important files are getting backed up.

And then there’s the case of email software (such as Outlook, Thunderbird, etc) and database applications. These store their data in unusual locations in order to limit the chances of they getting messed with or accidentally erased. So if you are using an email software, client database software (such as Act!, or Business Contact Manager for Outlook, etc) then again it’d be highly recommended to make sure that these data are backed up too.

Recovery from a hard drive crash

Another very important point to understand in regards to online backups is that they do not back up your whole system – at least I’ve never seen one that does it. They lack the ability to have access to system files. So if you have a hard drive crash then you’d need to full reload of your system (Windows & your software applications) and then restore your files from the backup. It’s not a quick process and could become quite complicated if you are using some little known software. However, it’s still a lot better than losing your documents and other important files.

What I recommend is to have a local backup also, using an external hard drive. With that setup quick backup and restore is possible and also if the right software is used then a full system restore can be done easily and quickly. One good software that is capable of this is Acronis True Image.

Versioned Backup

Well, so far I only mentioned the shortcomings. To have a full picture I want to mention one of the most useful features that online backups have. They store previous versions of files, usually for about 30 days back. Let me give you an example to see how this works:
You were writing a long essay and accidentally erased a paragraph on Monday and didn’t even noticed it until Wednesday. Since then there were a lot of changes and additions. In most backups the later backups of files simply overwrite the files there were previously backed up. That would make that paragraph un-recoverable. But fortunately online backups saves dated copies of files so you can go back to the Monday version of that essay and restore it to another location, open it and get that missing paragraph copied and pasted out of it.

Summary

Online backup software are very easy to set up and they do a good job at automatically selecting and backing up the usual locations where important files are kept. However, don’t take it granted that it’ll back up all of your important stuff on it’s own. It might need a little help on pointing out what are the important things that you also want to back up.

To overcome the shortcomings of online backups I’d recommend a combined, online & local, backup configuration which provides speedy backup and restore while also giving the security of data that comes with off-site data backup.

Did you find this information useful?
Please consider donating.

You can leave a comment for the above article. Comments will not show up automatically but will be reviewed and incorporated into the article if they contain useful information.

cforms contact form by delicious:days